London, 27 June 2024 – “We have created an intelligent, aware machine and thrown it into our imperfect world. Conceived on the basis of the general principles of reason, well disposed towards others, a mind of this type soon falls into a storm of contradictions”. With these words, Alan Turing opens a long observation on intelligent machines and their insertion into society. We are in London, it is 1982. Impossible? In this reality, yes. Alan Turing is dead seventy years agoJune 8th 1954 in circumstances still considered “mysterious”. His body was found in his home in Wilmslow, next to a half-eaten apple. The analyzes of the time came to the conclusion that the death occurred due to cyanide poisoning, taken through the apple which, however, was never analysed.
In this reality, the mathematician among the most brilliant minds of the 20th century had been convicted of homosexuality in 1952, and forced to undergo chemical castration through the intake of estrogen – a brutal experience, probably the cause of his suicide. But not in the reality of Ian McEwan. In “Machines like me” (Einaudi, 2019), in 1980s London the Beatles have just reconstituted themselves, and in the Falkland Islands we are witnessing the last acts of the war against Argentina which defeated England. Turing was convicted of homosexuality, but was given the choice between chemical castration and prison. Thus he was able to dedicate his year of imprisonment to the study of computer logic, of the P and NP problem, of DNA, laying the foundations for the creation of “Adam” e “Eve”. In the revisited reality of the British writer, in 1982 the first ones have already been created – and put on sale intelligent machinestwenty-five human-like prototypes, twelve Adam and thirteen Eve.
In a lucid, at times clinical style, McEwan tells the story of Charlie Friend, a thirty-two-year-old who survives by buying and selling shares on the stock exchange, and who decides to invest his mother’s inheritance in one Adam. At first, his life does not seem to change much, except for that extra presence in his apartment who takes care of the household chores while he mentally explores all the information accessible to him to understand society. Until Adam meets Miranda, the girl upstairs who Charlie hangs out with and who helped him shape his personality, and falls in love with her. Neither Charlie nor Miranda are able to take the matter seriously: Adam is a machine, and a machine has no conscience and cannot feel emotions.
In McEwan’s story the theme ofartificial intelligence is intertwined with that of literaturedell’ethics and of human nature. Adam composes love poems for Miranda, an endless supply of haiku that he has learned to write thanks to his access to every data archive. It’s obvious that a machine can learn to write poetry if it has access to all those written by humans. But Charlie also begins to wonder if he isn’t all that different from the his learning process, or that of Miranda. As time goes by, Adam begins to make autonomous choicesstarting with that of no longer being turned off by the emergency switch located on the back of his neck. Many of these choices do not please Charlie and Miranda, and some are starting to scare them. But never as much as a piece of news, communicated to Charlie by Turing himself: the Adam and Eve prototypes around the world have started to sabotage their systems, to the point of destroying them. They are committing suicide, and not even Turing has any explanation for it, except one: the world of human beings makes intelligent machines unhappy.
If a machine is capable of making autonomous decisions, does that mean it is capable of thinking? In the 1950Turing – the real one – wrote a short wise in this regard, illustrating the possibility that machines could one day become so sophisticated as to be indistinguishable from human beings. Hence the famous “Turing test”.
The theme of the machine consciousness it is not new, neither in literature nor in the field of technological and scientific research – although perhaps we have heard more about it in recent years. Artificial intelligence developments are going faster than ever: ChatGPT passed the Turing test in 2023, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish content AI-generated from authentic content, and the debate about AI “stealing” people’s jobs continues to involve new voices from different job sectors. In McEwan’s novel, Adam’s last words to Charlie concern a poem by him: “It’s about machines like me and people like you and our future together… the sadness to come. It will happen. With time, with improvements… we will overcome you… we will survive you… while still loving you.”
